PRESS RELEASE

`The Mark of the Beast'

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

May 11, 2004 (EIRNS)This statement was released today by the LaRouche in 2004 political campaign committee.

Tell those lunatics who have been praying for the Battle of Armageddon (in the hope that they will be rewarded by a removal of their obligation to pay next month's rent), that the Bush Administration's behavior in the Iraq prisoner scandal proffers any competent intelligence officer clear evidentiary proof, that these pictures are clues pointing to a crime committed by those who, like the notorious Grand Inquisitor Tomás Torquemada, bear "The Mark of the Beast." The perpetrators of the crime against Iraqis held capitive, are the same circle of Vice President Cheney et al., who we exposed as nothing other than "beast-men" in my campaign's report on the Synarchist roots, which today's neo-conservative followers of Chicago's Professor Leo Strauss share with the fascists Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, and their like, of 1922-1945 notoriety. There, in the intention expressed by those Synarchist traditionsthat at the highest levellies the essential culpability, the essential criminality.

Most people today, think as if they were running around on a giant pool-table, bouncing off one another according to the mechanical rules of some Hobbesian-nightmare universe. Thus, they seek to explain nearly every experience in terms of "Who hit whom." For persons sharing that confused state of mind, the crime lies, essentially, in the willful action by the individual. An educated, sane person rejects that "Who hit whom" approach. The competently developed mind recognizes that an individual crime such as that reflected in the pictures from the U.S. prison in Iraq, is not essentially the result of the individual will, but the influence of the system on his, or her will. In such cases, as in the notoriety of the Inquisition, or the similar case of the U.S. Iraq prison-system today, the essential responsibility, the essential criminality, has been generated by those responsible for the Defense Department's design of the conduct of the continuing war in Iraq.

Consider a few relevant points.

The foolish President of the United States once announced that the war in Iraq had been won. What a fool he was, to put on a uniform, as if it were a clown-suit, stand on a carrier, and proclaim himself a mastermind in matters of warfare! The war has not ended to the present day; what the poor, mentally limited President mistakenly thought was the end of war, was the beginning of its more deadly, protracted phase, as Classical asymmetric warfare in the tradition of the post-MacArthur phase of the Korea War, again in Indo-China, and so on. The President started a war, could not end it successfully, and then blamed the nation which he had attacked (on fraudulent pretexts concocted by his Vice President's cronies) for refusing to play by what the President thought were his God-like powers to declare the war won at any time he just happened to chose.

The foolish President complicated his folly by putting Bremer, a known entity, in charge. Bremer occupied Saddam Hussein's offices, violated all standing principles for a U.S. occupying military force, and copied every bad kind of act, to the present day, for which Saddam Hussein had been accused by his own Iraq opponents.

Under the Bremer regime, Iraqis were tortured for information, presumably for the "weapons of mass destruction" which had almost certainly never existed.

Shades of the inquisition against the Cathars: "Kill them all, and let God sort them out!"

To free himself from continuing culpability in the ongoing crime, let the President call the accomplices of Cheney and Rumsfeld into the Oval Office. Let the President tell them all: "I have found the enemy in Iraq, and he is us." The President might add, pointing to his President of Vice: "Dick, get that damned rug out of your mouth!"